Spooked by visions of harbours clogged with floating shantytowns, cities across the B.C. coast are stepping up efforts to push out communities of “liveaboard” boaters.

Last month, officials in Port Hardy, B.C. ordered a group of boaters living in its harbour to clear out, echoing the example of coastal communities as far south as Washington State. Even in Kelowna, 400 kilometres from the coast, municipal officials have spent the last few years chasing houseboaters around Okanagan Lake.

“It didn’t use to be a problem, and now it’s a problem,” said Bill Sassaman, a 25-year liveaboarder and spokesman with the B.C. Nautical Residents’ Association, a group formed to resist eviction efforts.

The complaints against liveaboarders are usually the same: Their boats are ugly or they are blamed for the coasts’ growing scourge of abandoned boats.

In Brentwood Bay, immediately adjacent to B.C.’s famous Butchart Garden, seaside residents watched out their windows as marine squatters gradually accumulated an island of old boats and debris that, as of last December, was home to a goat.

Just to the north in Ladysmith, city officials have been struggling for years to regulate the “Dogpatch,” a hodgepodge of derelict vessels just off the coast. Every once in a while, one of them breaks free and drift towards shore — sometimes while on fire.

“The issue is not just about floating homes. It is about derelict vessels that are abandoned and are no longer afloat,” wrote Ladysmith city manager Ruth Malli in an email to the Post.

It was with Ladysmiths’ suggestion that the Union of B.C. Municipalities recently singled out “squatters in float homes” as perpetrators of “significant environmental damage” to coastal waters.

For more than a century, liveaboards were afforded carte blanche to anchor almost anywhere by the simple fact that waterways are a federal concern, outside the reach of local municipalities.

“You have a right to navigate on navigable waters, and part of navigating is anchoring,” said Mr. Sassaman.

The tweedy Vancouver Island municipality of Oak Bay is notorious for NIMBYist zoning laws — but their hands are tied when it comes to the flotilla of weather-beaten boats anchored just off their beaches.

One of those boats is even up for sale on a local classifieds site. For only $5000, a would-be liveaboarder could be bunking down within sight of the Oak Bay Marina on an old 1960s fishing trawler complete with wood stove. “It does not come with an engine, but could be easily refit [sic] with a new one,” reads the ad.

Six years ago, it was Vancouver that fired the first salvo against the province’s liveaboarders. In a pre-Olympics push to clear space in False Creek (actually an inlet), marine police took the unprecedented step of handing out eviction notices to anchored boats. Some saw their boats impounded when they refused to leave, others set out for the less-protected waters of English Bay, where they were at the mercy of incoming storms.

Across the Salish Sea, the Nanaimo Port Authority was inspired to similarly crack down on at-anchor boats, limiting them to two weeks per year of free moorage — six months if they had insurance and sewage tanks. To Ladysmiths’ chagrin, some simply sailed south and moved to the Dogpatch.

Liveaboarders assert that they are simply cursed with a bad name. “We are seen as tax-evading back-to-the-landers who can’t afford decent housing, or we are trying to ‘hide’ from the ‘real world,’” wrote Marilyn Guille, a liveaboard veteran of 16 years in an email to the Post.

Plenty are retired or gainfully employed, and as the story goes, they were lured to the sea by a desire for adventure, simplicity or privacy. “My hubby and I have lived afloat for 17 years, and we’ll never go back to land if we can help it,” wrote Ms. Guille.

“There’s a lot of single guys that are … single for a reason,” said Mr. Sassaman. “It really is better for them to be anchored out on a boat — if you follow me — but they also tend to be quite responsible,” he said.

When a leaky basement is a potentially fatal problem, he said, it inspires a certain commitment to home repair.

Still, even when municipalities are not dealing with rotting hulks drifting ashore, liveaboarders are often accused of fouling up the waters with litter or sewage. As early as 1997, Victoria conservation groups were pointing the finger at houseboaters for foiling efforts to turn the city’s Gorge waterway into a swimmable body of water.

Drew Smith, a former False Creek liveaboarder, bristled at the pollution accusations that condo owners levelled at him in the lead-up to eviction. Vancouver’s storm sewers empty into False Creek, delivering a daily tithe of spilled oil and road debris “and you’re telling me that my peeing over the rail twice a day is the main cause of pollution?? Frustrating!” he wrote in an email to the Post.

In Ladysmith, Dogpatch residents have even been accused of rowing ashore under cover of darkness to pillage seaside homes.

Nothing is confirmed, said Staff Sgt. Larry Chomyn with the Ladysmith RCMP, but there are “anecdotal comments from the community that there are individuals living there who may be participating in crime.”

Ne’er-do-wells are only a small minority of liveaboard residents, wrote Mr. Smith. The problem is, they often look the same.

“From a distance, in the Pacific Northwest rain, it can hard to tell whether that guy in the wool sweaters and toque and dirty oilskins is a nice, friendly computer engineer who is conscientious about maintaining a seaworthy vessel, or a skid-row alcoholic who was given an old boat and treats it like a floating shelter,” he wrote in an email to the Post.

Still, thanks in part to the vocal minority of liveaboarders “that give the rest of us a bad name, fewer and fewer marinas are willing to allow new live-aboards,” he wrote.

For Mr. Sassaman, it is a land vs. sea double standard. “If you had somebody in an apartment who was drunk and making a lot of noise, would you clear out everybody in the apartment?” he said.

Some B.C. floating communities have become tourist attractions. The Village of Cowichan Bay boasts on its website of its “vibrant, eclectic, group of individual water dwellers occupying floathomes and liveaboard vessels.

Every summer, the docks at Victoria’s Fisherman’s Wharf are packed with tourists perusing rows of picturesque floating cottages. But even Fisherman’s Wharfers felt targeted when harbour authorities enacted a sudden 83% rise in moorage rates designed to bring the wharf in line with competitive market rates.

Judy Ross is a Vancouver realtor specializing in Lower Mainland floating homes. In a city where even former crack houses can break seven figures, homeowners can pick up a respectable pad for between $50,000 and $200,000, and keep it docked with monthly moorage fees of between $800 and $850.

“You get all kinds,” said Ms. Ross. “Baby boomers who are still working, people who have second homes, retired people … and a lot of single women.”

And thus, the fight goes on.

Liveaboarders can install composting toilets, buy insurance, keep their boats shipshape and refrain from loud music and smoky barbeques. But still, land dwellers may still have trouble shaking the suspicion that they are “getting away with something,” said Mr. Sassaman.